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October 31, 2016

Up close and personal with sea turtles

Dave and I met sea turtles a few weeks ago!

How did we get up close and personal with sea turtles? We did Adventure Aquarium's Sea Turtle Encounter. Dave loves turtles. We have four of them. So I set up this encounter as a very early birthday present. He looks like he's enjoying himself, right?

cute little hatchling

They have a limit of three people for each sea turtle encounter, but this day it was just the two of us. The encounter started with a short talk about sea turtles by our biologist guide. The aquarium has greens and one loggerhead. At the time, it also had a little hatchling that was soon to be returned to the wild. We started there and watched the little guy swim around and eat some shrimp.

me on the dock

Then we put on life vests and headed to a small dock suspended over the main tank. This is where we would feed the turtles.

Here they come!

The tank was large, but once they knew we had food, they came over to investigate.

We used tongs to first feed them lettuce, then fish. We held out the lettuce for them, and we just popped the fish right in their mouths.

Bob

Bob, the female loggerhead, was especially cool about that. She held her mouth open and waited for us to drop in the piece of fish!

Like the first photo in this post shows, we could touch the sea turtles, too. That was great!

I can't say enough about how much fun this encounter was, and the biologist leading it was fantastic. Dave and I checked out the rest of the aquarium while we were there, and of course Dave had to ride the sea turtle in the kids' area.